Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Dirk drew away, offended.
Ariah looked at her husband in innocent surprise. The big handsome face, tired from the ordeal of the past week, like the face of an American boy who’s had to grow up too quickly, was creased as if aggrieved. For the life of her, Ariah couldn’t understand why.
At this moment Chandler began squirming and burbling more urgently, filled his tiny lungs with air, and began to bellow. It was nursing time, luckily.
And so a baby came to dwell at 7 Luna Park. A baby!
He was an angel-baby, sometimes. At other times, a red-faced roaring little demon. Mommy and Daddy gazed at him in wonder.
Except he’d squeezed himself out through a far-too-small hole in her body, she’d have sworn he came from another planet. Krypton? Where the laws of nature differe from ours.
How he loved to cry, exercising those baby-lungs. Furious, purposeful, like one of those madmen-bully Fascist leaders you’d see in newsreels, Hitler, Mussolini, bellowing at their mesmerized audiences packed into public squares. Ariah was going to joke, “Maybe he’ll want a pulpit for his first birthday, he can start giving sermons young.” The allusion was to Reverend Littrell of course. But Ariah bit her lip, and went quiet.
Nights were not so romantic now at 7 Luna Park, in Dirk Burnaby’s old bachelor quarters. Nights were a very rocky sail on a dark choppy turbulent river leaving you dazed, seasick. Praying for dawn. “At least you can leave for ‘work.’ That’s where Daddys go.”
Ariah tried to see the humor of it. Dirk protested he’d stay home and help, if Ariah wanted him to. And he did hire a nanny, to help out when Ariah was totally exhausted. But Ariah rather resented the nanny, for Baby Chandler was
hers
.
(She’d never have another one of these again, she vowed. Oh, it had hurt! They say you forget labor pains but she, Ariah, wasn’t going to forget. Ever.)
A baby-angel, a baby-demon. Waking a half-dozen times in the
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night. Howling, ravenous. Demanding the breast. Both breasts. Filling his diapers with baby shit. (Which, dopey from lack of sleep and not her usual sharp-elbowed self, Ariah would almost, strange as it sounds, come to not-dislike. “It doesn’t smell bad, exactly. You get used to it. It smells like . . . well, Baby.”) A volcano, Dirk Burnaby marveled, that gushed at both ends.
Then there was nursing.
Nursing! Which Mother and Baby did, together, whenever Baby wished. A private matter. Baby’s hungry little fish-mouth suck suck sucking at her fat, milky breast.
Another kind of lovemaking
Ariah thought.
But we won’t tell Daddy.
No, best that Daddy doesn’t know.
Not that Daddy didn’t adore Baby, he did. But Daddy would not have wished to think of Baby as a male rival, exactly.
God, thank You. Now I am redeemed, and will ask nothing of You ever again.
2
“ I t s e e m s I ’ v e b e e n f o rg i v e n, I guess. By the Presbyterians, at least.”
Within a few weeks, Mrs. Littrell came alone, by train, to Niagara Falls to see her grandson. “Oh, Ariah! Oh my baby.” It was a tearful reconcilation, there in the noisy Niagara Falls train station, like a scene in a maudlin but good-hearted movie of the 1940’s, shot in wartime black and white. Ariah, now a married woman and a mother, and pretty damned proud of herself for coping as well as she did, mimed a face of daughterly emotion as she embraced her mother, startled by the older woman’s soft, warm, bosomy body, but she couldn’t leak out more than a tear or two.
Never! Never forgive you for
abandoning me when I needed you.
“Ariah, dear, can you ever forgive me?”
Mrs. Littrell asked anxiously, and Ariah said, at once, squeezing both her mother’s pudgy hands in her own, “Oh, Mother. Of course. There is nothing to forgive.” Dirk Burnaby the beaming son-in-law shook 146 W
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hands with Mrs. Littrell, gallant and kindly. And there was Baby Chandler in his stroller, blinking up at this weepy tremulous middle-aged woman and jamming fingers into his mouth. Mrs. Littrell crouched over him as over an abyss that made her dizzy. She stammered, “Oh, it’s a miracle. He’s a miracle. Isn’t he a miracle, oh what a beautiful little baby.” Ariah wanted to correct her mother, Baby Chandler wasn’t beautiful exactly, no need to exaggerate, but yes, maybe to his grandmother he seemed so. Mrs. Littrell begged Ariah to allow her to hold him, and of course Ariah consented. “Chandler, here’s your grandmother.”
“ ‘Grandma.’ I hope he’ll call me. Oh, how beautiful he is!”
Mrs. Littrell had planned to stay just two nights in Niagara Falls, in the guest room at 7 Luna Park, but she ended up staying six nights.
“Somehow, it’s easier when people aren’t on speaking terms with you,” Ariah said dryly. (Though secretly she was pleased with Baby Chandler’s triumph over her mother. There was a delicious revenge here.)
Mrs. Littrell had brought two large suitcases with her on the train, one filled with baby things. These were “new and used” baby things including some of Ariah’s own baby clothes from thirty years ago. “Do you remember, dear? This little cap, your own grandma knitted for you.” Ariah smiled and said yes, she thought she remembered, though certainly she didn’t. Why, these old things might have belonged to anyone, for all Ariah knew her mother might have picked them up at a rummage sale in Troy! The church was always having rummage sales in the basement. A sudden rage came over Ariah in the midst of their happy reconciliation, that her mother had no right to re-enter her life, when Ariah was doing so well without her, and without Reverend Littrell. Mrs. Littrell had no more right to re-enter Ariah’s new life than Gilbert Erskine would have had, resurrected from the dead.
Gilbert Erskine. Ariah never thought of him any longer. Yet in a dream of singular ugliness he’d come to her: doggedly knocking at the front door of her new home. Like the monster-son in “The Monkey’s Paw.” Cowardly Ariah had hidden beneath the bedclothes and sent Dirk to answer the door in her place.
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Obviously, Mrs. Littrell had no idea of Dirk Burnaby’s financial situation, bringing the young couple so many things, both new and second-hand. Ariah had told her virtually nothing of her married life in Niagara Falls; she’d sent only a printed birth announcement and a few snapshots of Chandler. Clearly, Luna Park intimidated the minister’s wife from Troy. The elegant brick homes in the leafy residential neighborhood near the river; the neo-Georgian townhouses facing the park with their small but scrupulously tended lawns and black wrought iron fences; the spare, sleekly modern furnishings of Dirk Burnaby’s bachelor quarters; Ariah’s gorgeous Steinway spinet—all took Mrs. Littrell by surprise. Not to mention the Irish nanny, the housekeeper and the cook, who happened to be male, a Frenchman whom Dirk employed for business dinners several times a month.
And there was a Negro who tended the lawn, small as it was. Mrs.
Littrell seemed disoriented, as if she’d wandered into the household of another woman’s married daughter, but was in no hurry to leave.
Several times she murmured in Ariah’s ear, “Dear, you must be so happy, your cup overflowing!”
The third time Mrs. Littrell made this breathless observation, as Dirk lifted Chandler to demonstrate for Grandma his son’s remarkable kicking and flailing “helicopter stunt” as Dirk called it, wicked Ariah retorted, “Do you think my cup is so small, Mother? That it overflows so easily?”
Within the year, Reverend Littrell began to accompany Mrs. Littrell to Niagara Falls. Ariah’s father, too, fell under the spell of the Burnaby household.
Especially, he fell under the spell of the new baby.
Ariah’s father seemed to have aged in the past year. Ariah supposed she was to blame. He was a proud man, for all his Christian pulpit-humility, and Ariah’s behavior had scandalized him. His face was deeply creased and his Teddy Roosevelt jaws jutted with less confidence. He appeared shorter. His belly was more pronounced.
He’d acquired an annoying nervous habit of clearing his throat before and after he spoke, as if to obscure his words. Unlike Ariah’s tearful 148 W
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mother he never quite apologized to Ariah, nor did he embrace her as her mother had done. The most he could manage was to inform Ariah, when they were alone together, as if the statement were a biblical revelation, “Sometimes to act in haste is not to act unwisely, I see. You are blessed in your husband and child. Ariah, every hour of my life I thank God, that things have turned out for you as they have.”
Ariah said quietly, “Thank you, Father.”
Wanting to add, with a mischievous smile
Yes but I’m still damned.
That won’t change.
Well, Ariah was grateful. For her father’s words, however grudging. At a time in her life when she no longer needed them.
(Why should she care about anyone, really? Now that she had her baby. Hers.)
“What good, decent people your parents are.” Dirk spoke with his usual enthusiasm, and Ariah detected in his voice, in his smiling face, not the slightest hint of irony. She knew he was thinking
How different
from my mother
and so of course the Littrells might seem to him good, decent, ideal in-laws.
“Well. They are Christians, obviously.”
Ariah spoke lightly. No, she wasn’t being sarcastic!
In fact she was grateful, very grateful, that her husband, ever the gracious host, was so courteous to her parents. This gave her space to lapse into silence when she wished. It gave her opportunities to slip away with Chandler for a nap.
She liked it that, in the presence of his tall, confident son-in-law, who spoke casually and with authority of business, politics, the economy, law, and who seemed to know a good deal about the imminent development in the Niagara region of “hydro-power,” Reverend Littrell tended to be deferential. “Yes. I see. Oh, I see.” Where in Troy he would have asserted his own personality, here in Luna Park he was subdued. Dirk Burnaby was of a social class unknown to the
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Littrells, as his religious beliefs were undefined, and his sense of humor difficult to decode. Even Chandler, suddenly a toddler, was unpredictable. Competing with Grandma Littrell for their grandson’s fickle attention, Grandpa usually lost. The child regarded the old man with slow-blinking curiosity, unsmiling. Sometimes he pushed frantically away from Grandpa. In her father’s face at such times Ariah saw a look of genuine loss.
The power of a thoughtless child, to reject. To outlive.
So one generation grinds another into the earth. Into bones, dust.
Into oblivion. Ariah smiled cruelly to think how little the promise of heaven must mean, if you’ve lost earth.
“Chandler! That’s a naughty boy. Grandpa is going to read to you, see? Here’s your Big Lion book, your favorite.” Gaily Ariah hauled her son back to her father, and deposited him on the sofa beside the clumsily smiling old man.
Ariah was fearful of sailing, and didn’t greatly love the forty-foot
Valkyrie
riding the crest of choppy waves upriver, downriver, to Lake Erie and back, yet she pretended for Dirk’s sake to enjoy these excursions, or mostly. She foresaw a time when she’d stay home, and Dirk and Chandler could go out by themselves; but that time wasn’t just yet.
It was a festive occasion, however, when Dirk took his in-laws on a yachting trip to Lake Erie, five miles to the south, and dinner on the splendid outdoor terrace of the Buffalo Yacht Club. Ariah took a kind of pride in seeing how startled, how impressed, her father was with the sleek whitely gleaming yacht, when Dirk first brought them to the marina. She supposed he was wondering how much it cost.
(Never could he have guessed.) Mrs. Littrell was excited, anxious.
There were many other boats on the river on this bright windy day, sailboats, yachts, speedboats, what if there was a collision, what if waves swamped and oveturned their boat? Ariah saw that her mother was genuinely frightened. She spoke in a lowered, embarrassed voice not wanting her son-in-law to hear. Ariah said airily, “Impossible, Mother. Dirk is an experienced yachtsman.”
Yachtsman!
So casually 150 W
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uttered by one who, before Dirk Burnaby and this new life of hers at The Falls, had never so much as cast her eyes upon a vessel like the
Valkyrie,
let alone stepped on its lavishly appointed deck. In any case, once they were out on the river, Ariah and Mrs. Littrell stayed inside the cabin, with Chandler. The wind on the Niagara River was relentless; Dirk insisted upon maintaining a certain speed; he hated to
“poke along”; when clouds were blown across the sun, the temperature dropped ten degrees. Ariah worried about gathering clouds over the lake toward which they were headed, but said nothing to her mother, of course. In the region of the Great Lakes, weather changed rapidly: forecasters were always making mistakes. Chandler was thrilled by Daddy’s big boat but tended to become overstimulated by it, and tired quickly. He became cranky, fretful, teary, babyish. “He’s a high-strung, sensitive child,” Mrs. Littrell said protectively. “He takes after his mother.”
Ariah laughed. “Is that how you see me, Mother? ‘High-strung, sensitive’?” She didn’t know if she should be flattered, or insulted.
She was feeling damned proud of herself these days, a first-time mother.
For a while after Chandler’s birth, she’d been not-herself, you might say. Exhausted, melancholy. Wanting to crawl into a nest of bedclothes and hide. But she hadn’t, had she? Her hard little breasts had ballooned with milk, sweet delicious milk demanding to be sucked.
Mrs. Littrell was saying quickly, “But also very talented, Ariah.
Very—intelligent. Mysterious, a bit. Your father and I have always thought so.”
Mysterious! Ariah liked that, a little better. She asked:
“And how does Chandler take after his father, d’you think?”
“His father? Why—he has his eyes, I think. There’s something of Dirk about his mouth. The shape of his head.” But Ariah’s mother sounded uncertain.